Archive for the ‘butcher, baker’ Category

It’s the last day to view the movie freebie, Hungry for Change. www.HungryForChange.tv/online-premiere J.R.R.Tolkien would no doubt be highly disturbed at our loose use of the word “food” to label the odd chemical compounds and un-nourishing concoctions which we insert (with hopeful nutritional urges) into our mouths. In correspondence with a friend, Tolkien bemoaned changes that had already occurred in his own day with synthetic foods when he wrote with a prophet’s imagination of “days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood—they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet… are articficial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”

From Tolkien’s letter to Authur Greeves. Clyde S. Kilby, Tolkien and the Silmarillion.